I first met Stephen Hawking in March 2003, when the most famous scientist in the world visited Texas. For a young science reporter at the Houston Chronicle, an invitation to interview Hawking during a stop in College Station rated as a real coup.

Reporters never like to submit their questions to a subject in advance; indeed it is something I often refuse to do. However, with Hawking and his limited ability to communicate, this was a prerequisite. As almost all of his motor skills had atrophied, Hawking used a custom-made computer to form words, which were then spoken through a voice synthesizer. Typically, he could form a short sentence in about five to 10 minutes.

Prior to meeting with him, I asked a number of scientific questions of Hawking. But, after all of these years, the one query, and answer, that sticks with me concerned the hottest issue of the day, the impending Iraq conflict. What did he think about the likelihood of the United States going to war against Iraq?

Enlarge / This headset will give you a much sharper image and a much lighter wallet than the original Vive. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

HTC's higher-resolution Vive Pro, first announced back in January, is setting new records for the price of a mass-market virtual reality headset. In pre-orders starting today ahead of planned April 5 shipments, customers will have to shell out $799 for the improved Vive Pro headset, a price that does not include any controllers or Lighthouse tracking base stations.

While the original Vive also cost $799 when it launched nearly two years ago, that package included two controllers and the two tracking stations necessary for un-occluded, room-scale VR. Existing HTC Vive owners will be able to reuse those accessories if and when they upgrade to the Vive Pro headset. New users, however, will currently have to purchase them à la carte (an HTC representative tells Ars that pricing for a separate "full kit" Vive Pro package will be announced soon).

In the years before (and even some years after) the Game Boy revolutionized the portable gaming market, self-contained, single-serving LCD games were the best electronic gaming-on-the-go many of us could hope for. The Internet Archive has now captured a handful of these proto-examples of portable gaming for play in the Web browser, via MAME-powered emulation.